I work in the industry. While this is theoretically true, in practice it is not.
First, bonds for decommissioning solar sites are required by many programs now. These usually cost 3-5% of total initial investment. Not insurmountable by any means.
In reality, these bonds are unlikely to ever be utilized. Most sites will never be decommissioned unless the owner wants to redevelop the land for something more profitable. The interconnection rights alone are worth way more than the cost of decommissioning.
Recently, repowering solar sites has become a hugely profitable endeavor. Most projects have a 20-30 year power purchase agreement, often at a fixed price per MWh. That initial price was set very high based on the massively more expensive cost of deployment (equipment and install cost about twice as much 10 years ago). Squeezing 20% more capacity out of these projects by repowering these sites with more efficient modules and new inverters, is often a windfall, given the falling costs involved.
That's not to say there are zero issues like the ones described. Like most early stage technology-heavy industries, early solar projects often utilized a lot of "innovative" technological strategies that dead-ended and are therefore much harder to maintain.
But overall this is just not much of an issue in practice.
10k is a reasonable guess for how much tax liability is needed, and it's not a huge issue, but it is an issue. Retirees and lower-middle income folks often pay less than that each year, as do folks with even lower incomes who inherited their homes.
Particularly if you go the hardware route, might be worth exploring this as an option for utility scale solar farm inspection. Quadcopter drones often have insufficient range for the larger farms, and solar companies are increasingly making full site scans a regular part of the O&M process (they have has been used in commissioning larger sites for years).
I actually 100% agree with this comment, except the "only being done to maintain appearances" part. A blunt instrument is better than no instrument. By raising interest rates, the fed is reducing average inflation by cooling the market across the board (though unfortunately with very little direct effect on the primary driver of energy consumption, which is very inelastic). Without cooling the economy a bit, normal inflation plus the supply side drivers could lead to hyperinflation, and/or stagflation.
Supply chain issues won't sort themselves out for 3-4 years, possibly more - it can take at least that long to get a new domestic semiconductor chip fab or solar panel factory from the idea stage to full capacity. And if you are a business, the level of uncertainty as to what 4 years from now will look like makes a huge investment like that less than desirable. (Source: I work for businesses in these spaces).
Businesses just aren't as nimble as we were led to believe, and it's going to be a bumpy few decades in all likelihood, assuming China stays on the path of no-dissent nationalism and the U.S. stays on the path of re-industrialization.
In the long run, we need to transition the energy grid to electric/renewables/storage as fast as possible to get off of the fossil fuel roller coaster that has caused every major inflationary event. In the medium-term, we need to reduce impediments to building physical things in our country, so that businesses can respond more quickly to increases in prices by increasing supply.
Let's take an extreme example. If banks offered everyone 0% interest mortgages with 100 year terms and no credit checks, how many more people would want to buy a house? A lot! It would take decades for builders to build enough houses to meet that demand. In the meantime, house prices would go up by a factor of 10, along with wood and other building materials. Meanwhile everyone who already owns a house is cash out refinancing their now multi-million dollar home, and suddenly everyone you know who was a homeowner at the beginning of 2023 is now a million dollars richer and spending it quickly.
The same with businesses. Let's say you're a growing business. Things are good and you've been investing your 10% profits each year into hiring. Now banks decide that all decently profitable businesses can have that same 0% interest mortgage with 100 year term. Why not double, triple, quadruple your team? You could achieve your goals so much faster! But then the banks are offering all of your competitors the same deal. But there's not enough talent to go around.
Suddenly you're in a bidding war for decent sales guys and the starting price is a million dollar salary. And those million dollar sales guys are spending their salary, competing with other million dollar sales guys for shit they don't need - the price of everything goes up.
This is an extreme example to illustrate WHAT JUST HAPPENED with record low interest rates. The economy was being heated up by very very cheap money. Inflation started getting out of control.
Now, if you were in the above hypothetical scenario, you might say "Hey maybe we shouldn't give out all those crazy loans, people are going crazy with all of this money, and it's kind of fucking everything up." And you would be right.
Also, reducing spending is even slower than reducing taxes.
The vast majority of government spending is on Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, and defense spending. Politically those are untouchable, mostly for good reasons - reducing any of them will result in people literally dying.
The vast majority of what's left is hugely impactful high ROI activities like scientific research, infrastructure projects, and other basic good governance activities.
Too slow. While I fully agree that taxes have gotten out of whack and should be raised, raising taxes would have an impact a year from now (way too slow of timeframe to manage inflation). Additionally, practically speaking, the government would have one shot and no realistic way to quickly correct if they raised taxes too much or too little. Finally, there's so much uncertainty in the market when major political decisions like that are afoot, that you risk doing harm just from the perception.
The fed has the power to act quickly. They raised rates a little on almost a monthly basis last year. Each was a little experiment. If they raised them too much, they could reduce them the next month. If they raised them too little to fully counter inflation, they could continue raising them.
Finally, the issue isn't getting "money" out of the system - it's getting purchasing power out of the system - reducing demand. And most people are buying 5-20% of houses, banks are buying the rest. Most large businesses aren't paying cash reserves to pay employees, they're using debt to pay those salaries.
Lots of smoke in the comments here. The Fed is doing what needs to create relative stability. Uncomfortable, but real. Demand is outstripping supply and prices are going up. The least painful option is raising interest rates. Alternatives are hyperinflation, (very bad), or various price fixing schemes (which have literally never worked despite many attempts and are even worse in the ultimate outcomes). There are lots of reasons why this is happening, and none of them are related to a "fake economy:"
People and businesses came out of lockdown with saved money and basically free loans burning holes in their pocket which caused a spike in demand (Least important, probably no longer an issue)
Businesses came out of lockdown with a diminished staff and a ton of new uncertainty (much more important, takes a while to recover for some businesses that are planning production multiple YEARS in advance).
Deglobalization/ U.S. national re-industrialization, started by Trump, continued with Biden, which will increase prices on pretty much everything. This is both a reasonable response to the issue, and makes the issue worse in the short term.
There's a hot war with a major energy producer, Russia, which will increase prices for every product where energy is an input (almost every product).
The biggest manufacturer in the world, China, has randomly been shutting down factories and whole metropolises for weeks at a time for the last several years. We just got a correction in this regard, but it will take time for the supply side of the equation to ramp back up, especially given all of the moving parts and uncertainty outlined above.
Bottom line - lean supply chains function well when everything is stable for a longish period of time and it looks like it will continue to be for a longish period of time. In unstable/uncertain environments, supply chains break down, and supply can't keep up with demand, and the government can't keep handing out free money without causing prices to hyperinflate.
First, bonds for decommissioning solar sites are required by many programs now. These usually cost 3-5% of total initial investment. Not insurmountable by any means.
In reality, these bonds are unlikely to ever be utilized. Most sites will never be decommissioned unless the owner wants to redevelop the land for something more profitable. The interconnection rights alone are worth way more than the cost of decommissioning.
Recently, repowering solar sites has become a hugely profitable endeavor. Most projects have a 20-30 year power purchase agreement, often at a fixed price per MWh. That initial price was set very high based on the massively more expensive cost of deployment (equipment and install cost about twice as much 10 years ago). Squeezing 20% more capacity out of these projects by repowering these sites with more efficient modules and new inverters, is often a windfall, given the falling costs involved.
That's not to say there are zero issues like the ones described. Like most early stage technology-heavy industries, early solar projects often utilized a lot of "innovative" technological strategies that dead-ended and are therefore much harder to maintain.
But overall this is just not much of an issue in practice.